Case Studies - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 241

is interested in outsourcing as a possible direction for his company, he's
interested in the fortunes of these companies.
Fred wants to monitor a speciic type of data that's found on the Internet. In
this case, it's stock performance. Perhaps in your case it will be something
else. Fred probably has done various kinds of stock monitoring before.
Perhaps his company even subscribes to an information service. If it does
not, Fred could go to Yahoo Finance, for example (inance.yahoo.com) and
either set alerts for certain companies or subscribe to their RSS feeds. In
any case, such a speciic type of information doesn't have to be part of the
information trapping process, but it's relevant to Fred and his strategy.
Fred's future strategy
At the conclusion of his work, Fred has 75 or so feeds in his reader, several
e-mail alerts set up, and a hundred or so pages in a page monitor. He has
made his boss aware of his traps and will be spending an hour or so in the
morning reviewing them before proceeding with the rest of the day's work.
Fred has a base of constantly updating data to sit through as he builds his
report about outsourcing in Taiwan. How long he uses this information
depends on when his report is due, whether or not his boss wants him to
treat his report as an organic, ever-changing document, the directions his
research takes him, and so on.
In the case of Fred, most of the information he's looking for is external—it's
not directly related to his company. In Ethel's case, however, there's a need
for tracking more internal information.
Ethel Tracks a Blog
Ethel has a blog that she wants to use to make herself better known in the com-
munity. She understands that she'll need to create good content, make sure
she's publishing an RSS feed, and submit her site to search engines. Beyond that
she wants to see who is linking to her site and what is being said about her site.
Unlike Fred, who is monitoring information for a report that will one day
end (ostensibly), Ethel is setting up her information traps to be monitored
on a more-or-less perpetual basis. And unlike Fred, Ethel will be looking
at resources like blogs, so she will probably have more luck with discussion
groups, and may not need to monitor news at all. However, like Fred, her